Bryan Miller
To the more casual moviegoer, Fucktoys (recently screened at, among others, the Twin Cities Film Festival) is bound to be a shocker, while seasoned fans of sleazecore will more likely find it downright sweet. File it in the archives under: depravity, gentle. It’s neither for the faint of heart nor the jaded sicko, but its lighthearted luridness is a beguiling, proprietary blend, not to mention a significant accomplishment for first-time filmmaker Annapurna Sriram.
It would be a real flex to talk about Fucktoys without mentioning John Waters, the Pope of Perversion. His influence here is undeniable, most obviously the parallels between this and his sleazoid classic, Desperate Living. Fucktoys’ lead duo of AP and Danni (Sriram and Sadie Scott) spend 24-ish hours motoring around the fictional hamlet of Trashtown, echoing Mink Stole and Jean Hill’s exile to Mortville. Yet Fucktoys’ dreaminess and flights of whimsicality align it just as closely with Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating — even if Celine and Julie would never have a heartfelt conversation while they simultaneously peed on an old man in a bathtub. Think of it as John Waters and Catherine Breillat Go Boating.
AP has just learned from a psychic (the fabulous Big Freedia) that she is cursed. It explains her tooth falling out, her recent breakup, and her generally calamitous life. It’s going to cost a thousand dollars, plus the life of an innocent lamb, to reverse her juju. So when AP runs into old pal Danni, who is participating in an all-female fight club when they reunite, the pair set off through Trashtown on a quest to perform enough sex work to pay for the ritual. Their smutty odyssey takes them from a seedy hourly-rate hotel to a strip club to orgies of the rich and famous, where the kooky and the kinky are doled out in equal measure — which is to say, heaps.
Their smutty sojourn on a puttering moped is jaunty but doom-tinged. Most of the men they meet, save for AP’s buttoned-down regular trick, Robert (Damian Young), fall somewhere on the spectrum between terminally self-obsessed and outright predatory. And Trashtown is a barely exaggerated version of America’s stark economic contrast; every setting is either a luxury estate or a dilapidated building on the verge of condemnation. Sriram is able to deftly balance those contrasting tones right up until she isn’t; the film is fun if somewhat lacking in stakes until the end, which then zags a bit too hard. Tonal shifts are fine — consistency is for squares — but the final act breaks the spell.
But that spell-breaker is not a deal-breaker. Fucktoys is a bold announcement of Sriram’s prodigious talent. She has a fairly extensive résumé as a film and TV actor, but this is a whole-ass vision, gorgeously realized, with a vivid color palette and a keen eye for both the squalid and the sublime. The easygoing vibes can sometimes make the performances seem casual, but make no mistake, these are two powerful lead performances from Sriram and Scott, who make for an enormously appealing pair.
Sriram, in particular, really puts herself out there, and not just the most obvious sense of the film’s physicality. It’s one thing to write scenes of sex or shock comedy, and another thing to act them out, and a whole entire other thing to write them out to perform them yourself. Sriram does it all with both a transgressive smirk and unambiguously ambitious artfulness. Fucktoys is one of 2025’s most interesting debuts.
